Craig Davidson - The Fighter

She was tall: they met eye to eye. Her lips were almost colorless, her mouth big and hard and brutal enough to chew right through him.

Her shaved pussy had a starchy, ruffled look, like the collar of a Victorian gentlewoman’s dress. In the room’s sulfurous light she looked like a young man.

Her breasts so small, slender body roped with taut muscle. Like a teenage boy.

Paul pulled bills from the pocket of his jeans and placed them in the Gideon bible, between pages in the Book of Leviticus.

Adele smiled. “What is your pleasure, sir?”

He considered her and sighed. He could only make a fist and slug his thigh. Adele intuited something in this gesture — his need was as naked and undisguised as the buzzing neon M through the parted drapes.

She said, “I can do that.”

They stood close but not quite touching.

“Well,” Paul said softly, “what are you waiting for?”

The first blow glanced off his forehead. The room was so dark, visibility so poor, that he did not see it coming. Adele’s fist had some serious steam behind it: fragments of shooting light spun before his eyes like formations of burning birds. He was still grinning stupidly when a second punch, this one much harder, rocked his jaw.

Paul tripped backward, startled and unbalanced. His thigh rammed the bedside table, knocking the lamp off as his feet swung out from under him. His skull slammed the wall and he dropped to the floor, crushing the lamp: the cheap cellophane shade crumpled and the light bulb burst with a powdery pop to drive eggshell shards of glass into his ass.

Her hand twined in his hair, dragging him up. Her lips pressed to his ear, breath stinking of sour bananas: “Like that, don’t you?”

Before Paul could reply she slugged him in the belly. Twin whips of snot spurted from his nostrils. She punched him under the chin, an unforgiving uppercut that shut his mouth. His new teeth collided. One shot straight up into the air. He swallowed the other one and fell back on the bed.

When the cobwebs cleared he propped himself on his elbows and found her kneeling between his spread legs sucking his cock. She bobbed up and down, her hair — yellow like greased wheat — fanned over his thighs. Her tongue was small and pink, hot and wet, and she kept flicking it over the tip of Paul’s hard cock as she sucked him off.

“Wait, now,” he said, groggy but alarmed. “My god—!”

She took a swing at him with his cock still in her mouth, clipping his chin, and he fell back again. She grasped his hips, sharp painted talons digging deep into his ass, thick strings of saliva hanging from her lips as she bent to inhale his dick, taking the whole of it into her throat. She gagged around its size, a barfy-burpy sound. Paul had never felt anything like it. She kept pumping the shaft, impaling her mouth on it while at the same time slipping one finger between his legs, between his ass cheeks, pressing that finger against his asshole, circling, rubbing, and he tensed a bit before relaxing to let that raw skinny finger slip up inside him and he squirmed, helpless as an infant as she worked his cock, finger pressing his prostate, and it felt as if his every nerve center had been dynamited until she abruptly removed her finger from his ass and punched him in the kidneys so hard he retched.

She clambered atop him, straddled his hips. She punched him in the face — he could have avoided the blow but elected not to. Brilliant stars pinwheeled across the dark space between his eyes and the ceiling. She gripped his cock, rubbed the head over her clit. He was bleeding now, a ton of blood spilling from his torn mouth and ass. She ground her pussy against him, thrusting and bucking and slipping his cock up into her, riding him bareback as Paul idly contemplated the many diseases she might be infested with before realizing he didn’t give a damn. Her pussy was tight and wet, not loose and used as a first-time customer might suspect.

She grabbed the bible off the bedside table, laid it flat on his face, and smashed her fist into the cover. His nose cracked. She slapped his forehead with the Good Book, as if she were a revivalist preacher and he a possessed worshipper speaking in tongues. In the brown light she regarded him with an interest best described as clinical — a specimen pinned on a dissecting tray.

She slid his cock out of her and stood at the edge of the bed.

“Come on.” She was panting like a dog. “Let’s see it.”

Paul jolted off the bed and hit her as he might a tackling dummy, shoulder driven into her stomach, shoving her back. He had her up against the wall with his mouth hot on her neck, kissing and licking and sucking, hands propped under her ass lifting her a few inches off the ground. She guided his cock into her and he thrust up, slamming into her like the pump arm on an oil derrick, her long legs clamped around his hips, and she was kissing him now, biting his lips, one hand wrapped around his neck and the other clenched into a fist punching him lightly in the jaw, and in a high trembling voice she whispered, “This is great. This is really, really… great” and the realization that she was enjoying it, that the rough goings-on had penetrated her hard whorish soul, flooded Paul’s heart with a bizarre species of joy and he orgasmed uncontrollably, the world blanking out for a few seconds, and all he saw was this endless sheet of gray-blue ice as his knees buckled and he slipped out of her. He slid down the slender plane of her body, exhausted and trembling, until his lips came to rest on the bony swell of her hip.

She was breathing heavily. “Was it good for you, Rex?”

Before Paul could say a word she brought a knee up into his chin. His head snapped back, then he didn’t know a thing.

When he came to, Adele was gone. So was the cash in the bible.

In the bathroom he managed to tweeze most of the light-bulb glass from his ass with his fingers. He splashed cold water on his face and crotch and in the mirror surveyed the crazed geometry of his face.

A few fresh lumps and cuts. One of his testicles had swollen to the size of a racquetball; a violet spiderwebbing bruise spread over his ballsack. It was hard to distinguish one injury from the other: they all blended, cut-to-bruise-to-scab-to-bump-to-bruise-to-cut, red-to-black-to-purple-to-yellow-to-pink-to-blue. It had become impossible to recall where he’d absorbed them — in his mind they had merged into one single catastrophic injury.

He pulled his lower lip down and bared what remained of his teeth.

“Booga booga.”

From the motel he made his way toward Mount St. Mary’s hospital. He followed snaking streets and narrow alleyways, crossed bridges spanning iced-over streams on his way to the place that he realized, deep down, he was destined for all along.

He bumped into a guy as he crossed the Rainbow Bridge. His fists instinctively curled before he got a look at the guy’s face in the yellow glow of the bridge lamps.

“Jesus,” he said. Then, “Hey.”

It was Drake Langley, his old prep school chum. But Drake looked nothing like he had: he wore an old army fatigue jacket and sported a clean-shaven skull. And apparently he’d rediscovered how to walk without assistance: the dog-headed cane was nowhere in sight.

Drake was missing a handful of teeth. The dome of his skull was grooved with long slits stitched with catgut. His face looked odd. After a moment Paul realized that his eyebrows and eyelashes had been shaved off.

“How’s it going, man?”

“I’m all right,” Paul said. “…you?”

“Fuckin-A great.”

Drake said he’d moved out of his parents’ place and was holed up with “a pack of hardcore animal rights activists” in an abandoned house on Paper Street.